Friday, April 30, 2010

Since Social Distortion is so clearly Mike Ness' souped-up vehicle, what's the difference between his solo career and the band's? Here, with these two take on the Bob Dylan (likely via Johnny Cash) song, "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" the distinction is laid out pretty clearly.

"It used to go like that..."

"...But now it goes like this..."

Ness does usually tour with a band, albeit a more country-rockabilly-folk one, as this 1999 FM broadcast from Boston demonstrates well.

Thursday, April 29, 2010

"I saw Mike Ness on TV and I said 'This is the perfect blend of everything my mom played for me The Who, the Stones, Dylan and punk stuff I was getting into'."

Brian Fallon, The Gaslight Anthem (Rolling Stone, April 2010)

That quote reminded me of the impact of Social D. on this generation of punks (in the school where I teach there's always a cadre of fans) in general and The Gaslight Anthem, whose legitimate debt to Springsteen is as over-stated as their debt to Ness & co. is under-stated (when I saw them on the '59 Sound tour they had a Social D. song as their intro music) in specific.

So for our last rarities bootleg, here's the spookily-real looking Recordings Between Then and Now, which while it does contain some overlap with previously posted bootlegs, it worth hearing on its own merits.

Twenty-some extremely rare demos, live, acoustic, B-sides, comp tracks by Social D. and still without great overlap with our last few boots. While there are, obviously, some justifiable throwaways here, there are some excellent items here including a beeped by by our ever-more-timid major labels version of the Clash's "Death of Glory".

I removed a few obvious gaffes from this compilation (including the frequently mis-attributed versions of "Pretty in Pink" and "Tainted Love" that are actually by Automatic 7 and Shades Apart, respectively) but since there was some solo Ness material already, I added this live duet on "Bad Luck" with big-time Social D fan, Bruce Springsteen.

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Six albums in thirty years! That's the entire Social D. Legacy, singles compilations, greatest hits collections and live albums aside, six short records. It leaves the field open for bootlegs of live shows, acoustic takes, radio edits, demos and b-sides. This collection, laced with ferocious live tracks, is one of many bootlegs but if you want any more I'm gonna have to insist on some motherfuckin' comments as proof of your sincerity.

This is the version of Social D. that I saw live a few years ago with Charlie Quintana (who played with the Plugz and Bob Dylan) behind the kit.

More Girls, More Cars and Even Louder Guitars link is in the comments.

Social Distortion's first album, 1983's Mommy's Little Monster, is a stone-punk-classic but their self-titled major label debut* from 1990 is the better still. By better, I mean while Mommy's Little Monster is, in style, words and music, inextricably linked to 1983 those songs from Social Distortion sound gloriously unstuck in time, as if beamed in from a radio station from a better world.

In-between the mid-eighties major labels scooping up (and subsequent destroying of) Husker Du and The Replacements and The Grunge Frenzy 0f '92 Social D. quietly signed with the big boys at CBS and had a modest hit with "Story of My Life", one of the best singles of the decade. While the lyrics and the melody boast a country simplicity, the execution smacks of punk aggression; it's like Buck Owens and His Clasheroos. It's also that singular kind of song that you'd give days off of your own life just to have been at practice when the author came into the grubby rehearsal room, acoustic guitar in hand, and said, "Okay guys, listen to this new song".

* In-between these two lies Prison Bound which starts of with one of their defining tracks ever but is otherwise not in the in the running for best-Social D. album.

Girls, Cars and Loud Guitars is a bootleg collection of B-sides, live tracks and outtakes from the early nineties that is crucial primarily for those who already own the real thing.

Girls, Cars and Loud Guitars link is in the comments.Speaking of comments, What is Social D.'s best album?

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

What hit me was that voice, that barbed-wire yet melodic voice of Mike Ness' that sounded snotty and world-wearyall at once.

It was back in the early eighties when the Rodney on the Roq compilations of SoCal punk were warping my taste for all time, that I first heard Mike Ness' Social Distortion detonate the song "1945". When Ness growls those almost standard-issue punk lines, "Flying over Hiroshima, 1945/The city looks small from way up here/I wonder who'll survive", they stay stuck in your brain till you find yourself singing along to that voice.

Ness has never lost that voice, one not notable for its great range but rather for its serrated-edged passion that never gives a song quarter. And his voice as a song-writer voice has also never wavered, every new development seeming to just uncover something we always knew was there but hadn't quite cottoned onto. To mark his early growth, here's footage from the documentary Another State of Mind of the very young Mike Ness taking us through the writing of a deceptively simple song of longing.

Today's offering is also an early sketch, in this case some early demos that are actually pretty ferocious and more than an adequate introduction to that voice.

1980 demos link is in the comments

Speaking of comments, give us your initial reaction to hearing Social D.

Monday, April 26, 2010

If you wonder if Soul Asylum really were a punk band, this 1986 cassette tape (on Twin Tone!) , alongside the mini l.p. Say What You Will is the proof. Thankfully, it also proves that they were an adventurous lot from the get-go. There's lots of odd ends her including now-deceased basist Karl Mueller singing James Brown's "Hot Pants", a rave-up of Johnny Cash' s "Cocaine Blues" and some Black Flag Oak Arkansas-styled originals like "Dragging Me Down", "Broken Glass" and "Your Clock".

Saturday, April 24, 2010

This is a fuller (but still edited for brevity) version of an interview I did with Teenage Bottlerocket’s Ray Carslile which I turned into an article for the Manitoban (please go and read that version here).

If someone’s never heard your band, how do you describe what you sound like?I always say we sound like the Ramones.

So you’re from Wyoming, has being so isolated affected how the band has developed? Absolutely. The limitations are there’s nothing to do tonight, the weather’s keeping us inside…if we go outside we’re gonna slip on sheet of ice and break our arms – so it’s grab your sticks and your picks…let’s play some rock music!

You’re heading out on tour with NOFX, led by Fat Mike who runs the label you’re now on, Fat Wreck-Chords. What was your reaction when they asked you to join the tour?“Yes”, my reaction was “Yes!” We had goals in mind with [the album] “It Came From the Shadows” and one of those was we’re gonna do a headlining tour for as long as we possibly can throughout the U.S. and then hopefully we’re gonna score a support slot for a band that’s huge. And by huge just somebody bigger than us. NOFX was definitely on the list of top five bands you would ever want to go on tour with in your life before you die.

Who else would be on that top five tour-with before-you-die list?Alkaline Trio and of course the heavy-hitters like Bad Religion, Green Day, Rise Against or some of the newer bands like National Anthem. But NOFX is on the top of the list, there’s no other band I want to go on tour with.

Do you all still have to book time off jobs to go on tour?No one’s making a living off this yet. Miguel’s just graduated, Kody works full-time in a grocery store and Brandon and I work for this oil company…we go out and we’ll work for months at a time in certain areas and then we’ll have a chunk of time off afterwards, for instance in August we were in Russia working on this oil well for a solid month.

What do you do on the wells?We’re telling oil companies how much oil is left in their reservoirs – I always tell people we’re dipstick guys - not to be confused with dipshit guys!

Back to touring, what sort of music do the guys in the band play in the van on the road?Toxic Holocaust, Municipal Waste, Ben Harper, Lawrence Arms, Dead to Me...The Hanson Brothers....The Varsity Weirdos from Moncton, New Brunswick.

One common theme of pop-punk is a sort of nerdy, self-deprecation, yet on your last single, the admittedly tongue-in-cheek, “Bigger than Kiss” (where you “beat the piss/out of Peter Criss”) you sound very self-confident. Do you think Teenage Bottlerocket’s playing at the top of their game right now?We’re four full-length into it and we’re constantly learning…we don’t put any restrictions on our song-writing either. If I say, “Hey I wrote a new song", no one’s gonna say, "that’s not Ramones enough we can’t play that one". There’s a certain confidence level you need to achieve to go up there and play your music. If you’re insecure about that, the audience can smell that from a mile away. Part of punk rock is being cocky. A part of our personality is very arrogant and yet at the same time we don’t take ourselves too seriously. The song is meant to be funny but there’s also a seriousness about it; whenever we play it live you can’t help but grit your teeth and headbang as hard as you can when you’re down-stroking – it s a let-take-on-the-world kind of feeling. It kind of works in all directions. It’s not a serious song - we’ll never be bigger than Kiss - but those guys just make themselves an easy target and I’m glad we took them down.

Everyone I showed that video to just flipped out. How did it come about?Our friend Ben Levin from New York did it…we tossed a couple of ideas at him but he came up with most of that stuff on his own.

Would the band ever consider following Green Day to a major label (such as they are these days)?If I was an A & R rep for a major label I would go after a young, attractive band - which we’re not, that could tour all the fucking time - which we can’t. I don’t think major labels are functioning on the ‘these guys write great songs let’s release them’ level. So I think that proposition would never come up. If someone wanted to give me a million dollars to record an album, yeah I’d do it.

Any forgotten, under-appreciated bands you’d like to talk-up now that you’re getting more famous?This band from Seattle called, Head. They’re really cool and I really liked all their albums.

And I liked the shout-out to Jodie Foster’s Army on “Skate or Die”.It was originally going to be D.O.A. but I chimed in and said, it should be J.F.A., they are the skate-punk band. Then the original plan was going to be sing D.O.A. on the vinyl and the CD would have J.F.A. but in the studio the D.O.A. line never came out.

So Kody Templeman from the comparatively more famous band The Lillingtons joined Teenage Bottlerocket after your first album. Is it hard to bring aboard another singer/song-writer/guitarist without all the usual ego troubles? No, it’s not difficult at all. I think all the best bands out there have two lead singers; Alkaline Trio, Dead to Me, Dillinger Four and what you’re saying reminds me of Rancid, where Lars wasn’t in the band all the time and then all of a sudden you have this new lead singer plus guitar player.What happen is, Kody and I get competitive with our song-writing. Kody will play me a song over the phone and blow me away and I’ll pick up my guitar and crank out a tune with Brandon and send it to Kody who’ll listen to it and he’s fricken’ stoked and fired up and the same time and he’ll write a song. That’s how we write records - we try to out-do each other but we’re all batting on the same team.

“Screeching Weasel on their worst day is a million times better than Teenage Bottlerocket on their best day.” So Joe Queer of legendary pop-punk band The Queers told you kids to get off his lawn and you were all pretty gracious in response. Why do you think that punk bands never have publicity-generating feuds?Like Notorious B.I.G. versus Tupac – I’ll cap you Joe Queer, you motherfucker (laughs). No, I’m not gonna lie and say I was born with a Mohawk, Green Day Dookie got me into punk music from there I discovered the Lookout catalog, I was the only kid in my high school listening to Screeching Weasel, the Queers. So there’s no bad blood. Just the fact that Joe Queer’s talking about me interviews is flattering, because I was listening to his records before I lost my virginity.

After the big tour, what’s next for the band?We’re doing a West Coast tour with Banner Pilot in July – which is gonna be frickin’ awesome and we’re playing Insubordination Festival and Skatopia with The Meat Puppets, D.I., C.J. Ramone, Gwar and Fishbone.

Any new recordings in the works?We’re constantly writing songs and we some new ones that are…pretty awesome – the humour has not gone away.

When NOFX comes to Winnipeg, Fat Mike sometimes sings a couple of bars of The Stretch Mark’s “Professional Punks”. Would you guys ever consider covering a song by a band from Winnipeg when you play here?“Ska Sucks” of course…whenever I think of Winnipeg I think of Propagandhi.

So what’s the best song ever written?I’d say “With or Without You” by U2 or “I Want to Hold Your Hand” by The Beatles and I’ve heard Kody say “Summer of 69” By Bryan Adams. It seems like these songs existed before they were written.

Oh and by the way would you ever play with your fellow identical twin bands Nelson, Good Charlotte, and Tegan and SaraI think we’d be the opening band for that show

Teenage Bottlerocket open for NOFX at the Burton Cummings Theater on April 26th 2010

Thanks to Ray for a great interview and Melanie Kaye for setting everything up!

Friday, April 23, 2010

The other day a customer says to me, "Don't look at me like a fag or anything but do you have any Soul Asylum?"

So now the reputation of this Minneapolis alterna-hardcore-roots-rock-cow-punk band, one of the eighties' most critically-respected groups, is so denigrated that suspect qualifications seem necessary just to speak their name in public, even at a bloody music store!

To hell with that; Soul Asylum mattered. Sure the dismissers could focus on their punny band name or the possibility that their one monster hit was just a fair-to-nice ballad with a heart-warming video, or claim that they threw their drummer under the bus and started dating Wynona Ryder after said fair ballad hit the upper reaches of the charts but they'd be missing those soaring songs.

The blizzard of songs, full of sadness and ripping melodies, that moved out of Minneapolis in the mid-eighties via Husker Du, The Replacements and Soul Asylum (plus Prince!) is to this day, hard to match. Yet, when this style of angst-riden pop songs shrouded in noise and dressed in flannel finally did steal the charts from M.C. Hammer, C & C Music Factory, G n' R et al, Soul Asylum had been (slightly) worn-down by record label malfeasance. It's not that the chart-topping Grave Dancer's Union lacks for good song-writing but neither the words or the music show the raw grit that their albums before (and even after!) it do.

(This version is a little rough but it fully shows what the band always did right.)

So as my little reminded that Pirner and Murphy' songs kicked ass in the saddest, catchiest way, here's a two track single of "Tied to the Tracks" b/w "Can't Go Back" pulled from the incomparable Made to Be Broken.

By the way, I sold that customer "And The Horse they Rode in On" and "Let Your Dim Lights Shine" and he walked out of there as gay happy as could be.

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Of course it was as a whirling & thrashing live band that Jason and The Scorchers almost converted a skeptical world to their shit-kicking cow-punk.

Sadly such hyphenated-hybrids rarely work in the land of rock n' roll and country's birth. As with Steve Earle (one of Jason's many co-writers) whose heavy metal-bluegrass only sold in Canada, Jason & the Scorchers' greatest success lay outside their hometown. In England "Shop It Around" hit the Top Forty and the band went down a storm in Germany* where this slightly-boxy sounding (and now out-of-print) live recording was made.*The only other true devotee of the cow-punk genre I've ever met, was a German co-worker at one of my earliest record store jobs - so, Andreas if you're out there somewhere this one is for you!

Monday, April 19, 2010

As I've said before, "Cow-punk, roots-rock, alt-country, y'alternative, whatever damn term you use for music that hurts like country and hits like rock n' roll, you're gonna come back to Jason and the Scorchers." (See me review of the new album here.)

And this, Reckless Country Soul, is where it all began back in 1982. It's a four song e.p. recorded under the name, Jason & The Nashville Scorchers which was later re-issued on CD with out-takes from their 1983 e.p Fervor, which had brought them to fame via...are you regular readers ready for this?... a cover of Bob Dylan's "Absolutely Sweet Marie":

The Scorchers sound, a shotgun re-marriage between rock n' roll and country, who'd been divorced after separate sordid affairs involving The Eagles and Kenny Rogers, is clearly being worked out in these early sessions. While the gonzo covers by Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers are fine statements of purpose, it's not till the later track, the lonesome, "Pray For Me Momma, I'm a Gypsy Now", that it's obvious that this union will be fruitful.

Reckless Country Soul link is in the comments

Speaking of comments, What's you take on Jason & the Scorchers' sound?

Saturday, April 17, 2010

Mike Peter's has beaten cancer, twice, all the while remaining ferociously active. In fact the 21st century version of The Alarm (with Peters as sole original member) hits even harder than the first version did. It's a testament to the indomitable spirit of Peters and punk rock as a whole.

Friday, April 16, 2010

"...The reason I played the acoustic guitar and the harmonica in The Alarm was because of Dylan."

Mike Peters

We've been discussing Dylan's accomplices and interpreters from within the punk fold, so let us not miss The Alarm. The Alarm, from Rhys, Wales, began as a punk band named the Toilets before morphing into mod-punk band 17 (whose one single has more hooks than some band's Greatest Hits' albums) and then becoming something different altogether. Despite often getting lumped in with U2, with whom they shared a manager, a religious persuasion as well as a fierce devotion to bombast and mullets, The Alarm cut their own path. Certainly their kinship with the U2 must be noted but overall such a flip write-off does violence to the band's hard-strumming acoustic anthems, which also suggest an amalgam of '65 Dylan, '75 Springsteen and '79 Clash.

Today's offering is a bootleg copy of the Alarm's first single from 1981 that I payed dearly for during a mad rush to own all their records many, many years ago. On the 'electric side', "Unsafe Building" does evince some U2-ish tendencies but the 'acoustic side's' "Up For Murder" is a skiffle-punk rave-up.

Thursday, April 15, 2010

The A-side of UK punk/new wave band The F.V's lone single from 1981 is a less-than-reverential run-through, some might use the word evisceration, of "Mr. Tambourine Man". This take on the song uses even less of Dylan's words than The Byrds (even seemingly adding a verse at the end) but adds some gang vocals and some quirky keyboard stabs, sorta like a cross-between early XTC and later Sham 69. (Somewhere Dylanologist Clinton Heylin is retching.)

(The b-side kicks along nicely as well and reminds me of Canadian punk band, The Diodes)

I'm a sucker for the brute energy that suffuses this era but the other reason this great little obscurity fascinates me is as another connection between Dylan and punk rock. Dylan's mid-sixties work and its influence on Lou Reed, then Patti Smith and then Joe Strummer (and to a lesser degree John Lydon) makes him a crucial punk progenitor in my book. Of course, as an adolescent, I often listened to my tapes of London Calling and Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits back-to-back, which might explain this strange obsession.

Mr. Tambourine Man 7" link is in the comments.

Speaking of comments, give us you quick review of this version of Mr. Tambourine Man.

*

The scan, the rip and the first post on this mysterious release (any further info from our readers would be greatly appreciated) are the work of Razor at Short Sharp Kick in the Teeth. If you haven't been to his blog you are missing one the great historical undertakings this out-of-control internet thing has to offer.

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Amidst the startling and abrupt changes of sound and word on which Bob Dylan's career is built, are some genuine lost possibilities. Bob's accomplices are legion - Joan Baez, The Band, Charlie Daniels, Johnny Cash, George Harrison, Deliverance, Mark Knopfler, Kurtis Blow, The Plugz, Tom Petty, The Alarm, The Grateful Dead - but mostly short-lived.

While some of those alliances were blessedly cut-short (The Dead!), some others were snuffed out before their possible prime. One such loss was Dylan's brief dalliance with L.A. punk band The Plugz. The Plugz, as musical history geeks must tell you, were the first of the L.A. punk bands to go D.I.Y. with their own label, Fatima Records, they also scored and performed in Alex Cox's creepy L.A. punk film Repo Man and were, alongside San Francisco's The Zeroes, one of the earliest Chicano punk bands.

In 1984 while morphing into the more mainstream-friendly band The Cruzados, The Plugz - specifically Tony Marisco (bass) Charlie Quintana (drums) with Justin Jesting (guitar) had done "a series of casual and scattered jams that (Dylan) had scheduled with us over a period of a few months before this one-time appearance," according to Jesting.

This one-off should not be forgot. The performance is blistering, with Dylan totally in-the-moment (the story goes that "Don't Start Me Talking" was completely spontaneous). It's not Dylan gone punk, it's Dylan '66 Revisited.

Despite this triumph (complete with one of those Bob head-scratching moments, this time when he battles an errant harmonica) Bob took rock hack Mick Taylor on the road for the passable-yet-unexciting 1984 tour that gave us the Real Live album. To make his abandonment of the Plugz sting even more, he would next join forces with then au courant producer Arthur Baker to record the middling album Empire Burlesque before abandoning quality control altogether for much of the rest of the decade.

Since 1984 the members of the Plugz have done a myriad of projects (Charlie Quintra's played with a slew of artist and recorded and toured with Social Distortion) while Dylan's had a series of come-backs and fall-backs (it can sometimes be hard to tell where one ends and the other begins).

Sunday, April 11, 2010

There are three figures I check obsessively here: number of comments, number of visits and number of downloads. The combination of those things is a big part of how I choose what goes up next. While in the end I cover what I love (I finished my series about American hardcore legend Vic Bondi in the face of almost complete indifference), the length of time I stay in any place and the frequency by which I return there is often decided by comments, visitors and downloads.

So, in terms of downloads and comments, here's what has generated the greatest response:

12. Joe Jackson - The Harder They Come ~ 421 D/L's (I trust RapidShare's numbers less than Mediafire's.)A brilliant little piece of work by JJ that is just begging for re-issue in some form and which I was pleased to remind people of.Comments: 28 (Coming on the heels of my biggest hissy-fit about not getting comments, this one generated a strong discussion about whether or not Jackson's later career was 'thorny'.)

10 Graham Parker Live at Marble Arch460 D/L'sMy series on Graham Parker was big on all three of my metrics - plus I love writing about GP.Comments: six (overall a great series for comments - one of which may well have been from Mr. Parker himself.)

9. Multitude of Sins - The Dylan Mass~ 460 D/L's (but someone set up a mirror - whatever that is - without asking me so that might have kept the numbers lower.)True, such mellow, acoustic music is a bit outside of my mission here but that said:Comments: 4 (A bit dispiriting, as this deserved an infinitely better response.)

7. D.I.Y Anarchy in the UK512 D/L'sWith a line up including every great '77 punk band (minus list-favourites The Clash) how could this comp go wrong?Comments: 8 (Decent till you recall that Blogger counts my own responses in the final tally.)

5. The Dik Van Dykes - Nobody Likes... ~543 d/l's (243 now and at least three hundred on MassMirror)Canadian funny-punk band that I'm proud as hell to have spread around the world (re-up coming sooner or later).Comments: 48 ( Best response ever - even beating the 41 commenters who took on my idea of Husker Du being the Great American Band - and it included a few encouraging comments from the band's front-man, Dik.)

4. Bob Dylan - Let My Poor Voice Be heard544 D/L'sPixel-stained wretches enjoy writing about Dylan WAY too much and our reward:Comments: 3 (Dylan fans are the absolute best for visits but the pits for comments.).

3. The Clash - Out of Control (The Alternate Cut the Crap)722 D/L'sIt's cool that something that helps a tiny bit to rehabilitate the much-reviled Cut The Crap (and all of the Clash items in this list are CTC-related) has generated such unexpectedly huge numbers!Comments: 12 (and many of 'em were sharp!)

1. The Clash - 12" mixes877 D/L'sUnstoppable, which is a little odd considering it is almost strictly for completists.Comments: 7 (Well it was at the tail end of a long series of Clash posts - Clash fans are still my favourite to write for!)

Usually I ask for comments about the music itself but for this time I'm gonna ask you: What was MRML's best post?

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